Paradigm Shift or Business as Usual? Workers’ Views on Multi‐stakeholder Initiatives in Bangladesh

Abstract

The scale of the tragedy at Rana Plaza in Bangladesh, in which more than 1,000 garment factory workers died when the building collapsed in April 2013, galvanized a range of stakeholders to take action to prevent future disasters and to acknowledge that business as usual was not an option. Prominent in these efforts were the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (hereafter the Accord) and the Alliance for Bangladesh Workers’ Safety (hereafter the Alliance), two multi‐stakeholder agreements that brought global buyers together in a coordinated effort to improve health and safety conditions in the ready‐made garment industry. These agreements represented a move away from the buyer‐driven, compliance‐based model, which hitherto dominated corporate social responsibility initiatives, to a new cooperation‐based approach. The Accord in particular, which included global union federations and their local union partners as signatories and held global firms legally accountable, was described as a ‘paradigm shift’ with the potential to improve industrial democracy in Bangladesh. This article is concerned with the experiences and perceptions of workers in the Bangladesh garment industry regarding these new initiatives. It uses a purposively designed survey to explore the extent to which these initiatives brought about improvements in wages and working conditions in the garment industry, to identify where change was slowest or absent and to ask whether the initiatives did indeed represent a paradigm shift in efforts to enforce the rights of workers.

Task performance and occupational health and safety management systems in the garment industry of Bangladesh

“…A similar practice is also noticed in the garment industry of Bangladesh. Although many Bangladeshi garment suppliers have Health and Safety Committee (HSC), health and safety issues get less priority in garment factories (Kabeer et al , 2020; Maalouf et al , 2019; Hossan et al , 2012). Moreover, enforcement of labor law is not received optimal priority in the garment industry either by the management of garment suppliers or by the government of Bangladesh (Anner, 2020; Ahamed, 2012).…”

Introduction: Disruptions in global value chains – Continuity or change for labour governance?

“…In a similar vein, Frenkel and Schuessler develop their LGS framework by taking into account the complex web of institutions, stakeholders and power dynamics in the post-Rana Plaza garment industry in Bangladesh, building on primary data collected through thousands of manager and worker surveys (complementing the work published in Ashwin, Kabeer and Schuessler (2020) and Kabeer, Huq and Sulaiman (2020)). They adopt an inductive approach that contextualizes the complex dynamics of labour governance in buyerdriven GVCs and offer recommendations that go beyond the empirical case at hand.…”

Logics of Sedition: Re-signifying Insurgent Labour in Bangladesh’s Garment Factories

“…An extraordinary amount of energy, not to mention funding, has gone into evaluations of the Accord, and the capacity or willingness of Bangladeshi factory owners to implement its provisions. A substantial body of critical scholarship has also emerged on the merits and disadvantages of the Accord and, by extension, its role in the empowerment of female workers (Ashraf, 2017; Hossain, 2019; Huq, 2020; Kabeer et al, 2020; Khan and Wichterich, 2015).…”